Art: “Music Box” by Tanya Pshenychny

She plugged everything in. Washer, dryer, microwave, Magimix, hairdryer, hair curler, baby monitor, electric blanket, table fan, dishwasher, kettle, coffee machine, carving knife, coffee grinder, lamps, lights, video, television, oven, computer, modem, router, scanner, fax machine, cellphone chargers, electric toothbrushes. She ran from room to room, burrowing through drawers, looking under the beds, and, eventually, every appliance with a plug was married to a socket.

Everything was switched on.

Fuses strained but they didn’t give. The house glowed and rumbled, fizzed and shook. She stood in the middle of the whirring and swooshing, the tumbling and spinning, the boiling and sizzling, listening to the sweet soul music of electrons flowing, and she closed her eyes and began to dance.

Tania Hershman is a former science journalist living in Jerusalem, Israel. A member of the WriteWords Flash Fiction I group, she has won several prizes for her very short stories. Tania’s fiction has been published in Cafe Irreal, the Hiss Quarterly, Front&Centre, Vestal Review, Steel City Review, Creating Reality, Entelechy Review, the Steel City Review, Riptide, the Ranfurly Revew, Magazine Minima, SouthWord and Transmission, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Tania is the founder and editor of The Short Review, a site dedicated to reviewing short story collections and anthologies. Her own short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, will be published by Salt in October 2008.
http://www.taniahershman.com
http://www.theshortreview.com

Tanya Pshenychny is a self-taught artist and illustrator residing in the Midwest. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine and migrated to the U.S. with gamily at age 9. She drew her way through high school, where she found her favorite medium. She loves the unpredicability of watercolor and the power of ink lines and uses them to illustrate messages, themes, and ideas. Pshenychny often finds herself comparing humans to animals and vice versa, and exploring metaphors. She includes a lot of personal meaning in her work but also strives for each piece to speak for itself. She describes her personal work as quirky, surreal, whimsical, melancholy, hopeful, and sometimes nostalgic.
http://www.razorberries.com